AMD's 2016 Linux driver plans (AnandTech)

Posted Dec 16, 2015 16:32 UTC (Wed) by fandingo (guest, #67019)
In reply to: AMD's 2016 Linux driver plans (AnandTech) by MattJD
Parent article: AMD's 2016 Linux driver plans (AnandTech)

> While AMDGPU is new and only supports newer GCN hardware, it isn't a complete break like you specify. AMDGPU is the kernel side of the driver. While it is clearly important, it still shares the same radeonsi driver in mesa, afaik. Thus, my older GCN card will still receive updates when radeonsi improves, even if AMD concentrates on AMDGPU.

Oh great, the prospects for performance improvements get even worse.

> Sure, but I find the OSS stack is a better working driver. For me, fglrx has more issues with compositing and general day to day tasks compared to mesa.

A potato provides a better experience on a current distro than FGLRX.

> First, the open source driver does have power management available for all cards, afaik.

Not really. They depend on the GPU's VBIOS to essentially handle all the power management, and only newer cards have sufficient VBIOS support. (That's not a bad design decision, though, but it does leave more users without a solution from AMD.)

> But if you care about performance, getting AMD over Intel (for GPUs!) is not a bad option.

And, this statement is like 4000% more true if you /s/AMD/Nvidia/ and s/Intel/anything else/. On Linux, the moment performance becomes an important factor there's no dispute which vendor/community deliveries the fastest hardware+driver combo: It's Nvidia and will be for the next several years. At the high end, Nvidia offers over 2x the performance per dollar (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=s...) of AMD cards, and that's entirely due to Nvidia's competent drivers.

AMD's 2016 Linux driver plans (AnandTech)

Posted Dec 16, 2015 16:43 UTC (Wed) by MattJD (subscriber, #91390) [Link] (5 responses)

>> While AMDGPU is new and only supports newer GCN hardware, it isn't a complete break like you specify. AMDGPU is the kernel side of the driver. While it is clearly important, it still shares the same radeonsi driver in mesa, afaik. Thus, my older GCN card will still receive updates when radeonsi improves, even if AMD concentrates on AMDGPU.
> Oh great, the prospects for performance improvements get even worse.

? Why would that be the case? They don't have to reimplement everything to get back to the current state, which gives them more time to work on performance issues.

>A potato provides a better experience on a current distro than FGLRX.

>Not really. They depend on the GPU's VBIOS to essentially handle all the power management, and only newer cards have sufficient VBIOS support. (That's not a bad design decision, though, but it does leave more users without a solution from AMD.)

How far back does this go? I haven't had really old AMD cards, so I'm not aware of everything. But my pre-GCN cards all have power management implemented, and it did require kernel support to get. And the newer cards also needed some kernel work to activate, so it isn't all in the VBIOS.

>And, this statement is like 4000% more true if you /s/AMD/Nvidia/ and s/Intel/anything else/. On Linux, the moment performance becomes an important factor there's no dispute which vendor/community deliveries the fastest hardware+driver combo: It's Nvidia and will be for the next several years. At the high end, Nvidia offers over 2x the performance per dollar (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=s...) of AMD cards, and that's entirely due to Nvidia's competent drivers.

In terms of all the raw numbers, yep Nvidia does generally win. I prefer AMD anyways due to there open source commitments, and they have been following through (though obviously not as fast as we'd like). I also prefer fglrx to Nvidia's driver, oddly enough. But I know I'm an outlier. And I don't hate Nvidia's official driver.

AMD's 2016 Linux driver plans (AnandTech)

Posted Dec 16, 2015 23:11 UTC (Wed) by adler187 (guest, #80400) [Link] (4 responses)

>>Not really. They depend on the GPU's VBIOS to essentially handle all the power management, and only newer cards have sufficient VBIOS support. (That's not a bad design decision, though, but it does leave more users without a solution from AMD.)

> How far back does this go? I haven't had really old AMD cards, so I'm not aware of everything. But my pre-GCN cards all have power management implemented, and it did require kernel support to get. And the newer cards also needed some kernel work to activate, so it isn't all in the VBIOS.

All the info is here: http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/

dpm is supported back to r600/r700 (back to HD2400 and up, but not all HD2xxx cards)

dynpm and profile are supported on all the cards AFAICT.

dpm = hardware based power management
dynpm = software/driver based power management
profile = manual power management

AMD's 2016 Linux driver plans (AnandTech)

Posted Dec 17, 2015 9:46 UTC (Thu) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link] (3 responses)

In other words: the free drivers provide full support for power management all the way back to GPUs released in 2005.
For context: cards in that era had OpenGL 2.1 support, typically about 256MB of memory and about 1/100 of the power of the current generation.
And all that's missing on even older cards is memory reclocking.

AMD's 2016 Linux driver plans (AnandTech)

Posted Dec 17, 2015 19:09 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

Not really.

Nouveau still doesn't have full production-quality reclocking (so it's slaughtered by the binary driver).

ATI drivers have had reclocking for some time, but it's nowhere close to what fglrx does. I remember that an ATI guy told on forums that the number of lines of code for power management in binary ATI drivers is greater than the total size of Mesa.

AMD's 2016 Linux driver plans (AnandTech)

Posted Dec 17, 2015 21:13 UTC (Thu) by adler187 (guest, #80400) [Link]

Yeah, reclocking on Nouveau is a WIP, but what does that have to do with AMD? If Nvidia hired people to work on Nouveau (they actually do, but only to support Tegra) or released docs as AMD does, maybe it would be better.

AMD just added preliminary PowerPlay support to AMDGPU: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=A... So at cards from Volcanic Islands on should be on equal footing with Catalyst in that regard.

AMD's 2016 Linux driver plans (AnandTech)

Posted Dec 17, 2015 21:07 UTC (Thu) by adler187 (guest, #80400) [Link]

Wikipedia says 2007 for the HD2000 line, actually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_proces...